Here's a collection of vero (stripboard) and tagboard guitar and bass effect layouts that we have put together covering many classic and popular effects in growing numbers. Many of these have been posted on freestompboxes.org, so check that site out for great discussions on building your own effect pedals. Enjoy the builds and please also visit us on Facebook and Twitter

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Tuesday, 27 August 2013

BJFE / Bearfoot Pink Purple Fuzz

To keep the collection complete this is the second recently reversed BJFE/Bearfoot pedal, drawn up by mmolteratx, thanks again Matt. Again this one sounds great to me.

Info about the original:The Bearfoot FX Pink Purple Fuzz blurs the lines. Is it pink or purple? Is it fuzz, overdrive, or distortion? In terms of the color—can’t it be both? In terms of the tone? It’s all three, depending on how you dial it in. The Pink Purple is very high gain, while remaining very low-noise, housing all your daily fuzztones (no crazy octaves or gated fuzz here) and blurring the lines between fuzz, distortion, and overdrive—with a versatile mid-EQ knob that takes you through a range of useful fuzztones.

Bearfoot FX is the brainchild of Bjorn Juhl of BJF Design and Donner Rusk of Donnerbox. Every pedal is handpainted and no two are exactly alike. The pedals now ship with a plain, unpainted bottom plate to help ensure the most secure contact with adhesive Velcro for use on pedalboards. Bearfoot FX pedals are handmade in St. Louis, Missouri, USA.

It isn't based on anything I've seen verbatim, but it's just 3 cascading gain stages like we have seen before, with a Big Muff type fuzz control and a often seen (for BJFE) Nature tone control. The JFET, silicon BJT and germanium stages will make a difference to things we've seen before with common transistors, and knowing Bjorn he's got it bang on.

This is one of the coolest blogs I have ever seen. I've built a couple of your layouts. Never a problem. On this layout - which is Q1,2,3? Also I notice you never include the schematic. Just wondering why.

Q1 is a JFET, so its pinout is DSG. Q2 is a BJT (bipolar junction transistor) and Q3 is a germanium. We tend to use those transistor images for each type. Nowadays, we don't usually depict germanium transistors with BJT transistor image/symbol, so the pinout is shown as black dots. So in essence, the transistors are 1, 2 and 3 from left to right.

The schematic question is one of the questions that pop up quite frequently.Schematics are not published by us because we do not have any rights over them. We would need to ask permission for each schematic from the author. All that in being that we're not in the business of breaking any intellectual property / copyright laws. Plus, all the schematics come from the web - so if we can find them, you should be able to find them too.+m

Heyas dsxThe freestompboxes site is usually where I poke around if I ever need a schematic... But I am having to give a huge THANKS to IvIark @ mirosol for these fantastic layouts, since they are imho the best to be found for vero - nice and small

Try starting with something simple - think about an object that goes along with the theme of the pedal, search google images for a line drawing or outline of that object, mess with that image in GIMP (free image editing software) a bit, and that gives you a graphic.

Cool fonts can be had for free from dafont.com and similar sites.

Lay it all out in GIMP, print it out on a waterslide decal, and bob's your uncle.

So, I am putting an order together and the transistors are hard to come by.

Mouser shows BC550C as obsolete. Then it has available BC550CBU,BC550CG,BC550CTA. I'm thinking the BC550CBU is fine? Tayda has BC550B, but the Hfe is a little lower for the B than for the C, according to the data sheet. I hate to order a few transistors from mouser. The shipping will kill me!

2N5952 is out of stock at Tayda, smallbear has it, and mouser requires a purchase of 1300 transistors!

2N1308 is a complete mystery. No one has it, except Ebay who sells them for minimum $12.00 after shipping. Seriously? Any ideas on what the best course of action is? Reading through the germanium pairs at small bear, I can't figure out what a lot of them are. But again, I don't really need a matched pair. Help!

I think I found my answer. The spec sheet just shows a slightly lower minimum Hfe for 2N1306 than 2N1308. But hey, these are germanium, so I doubt the "minimum" will come into play anyway. Especially if I order from Smallbearelec.

Received today the 2N5952, so I had to build it. I can confirm that it sounds (great!) and as it's supposed to. I can't find any problem, so you'll have to triple check your build, Altrax. My voltages are very similar to krzabe one's, so it seems that you have a problem in Q2 area:

Voltages:

Q1 D 5.38 S 1,79 G 0

Q2 C 4.88 B 2.85 E 2.29

Q3 C 2.73 B 0.75 E 0.64

Battery reading: 8,85v

Like the sound, but it's to late now to play high volumes, so tomorrow will check it in deep.

Finished and sounds great. Few subs. 15k carbons measuring around 14k76 to 14k8 20k Lin for Nature. AC176 for Q3

Only issue...with Fuzz at full, there is a small spot at about 80% sweep on Nature pot where a lot of oscillation creeps in. Pitch of oscillation rises till about 90% of sweep then pot works as expected. Maybe a bad pot? Too much gain?

Not really bothered as I've already found my set and forget settings but thought it was worth mentioning.

Just finished this one. Fantastic pedal! Used NTE312 (alt for 2N5952) and russian MA37 (sub for 2N1308). Compared closely to the Proguitarshop demo and sounds to my ears exactly the same (or extremely close).

If anyone else is getting oscilliation at some spots on the fuzz and/nature pot sweeps, it might be you have the germanium tranny (2N1308, in my case MA37) reversed - as in collector and emitter need to be switched around. I found that even when reversed, the pedal will appear to "work". In fact, the gain is ridiculously high when fuzz is maxed if the germanium tranny is reversed, and one might think that pedal is working as intended. Other pot positions sound pretty good too. But you will get oscillation at some spots and the same knob positions as the demo won't produce the same sound (you'll get more gain than you should).

Finished this one today (not boxed yet but fully tested). Absolutely love this one! Better than the arctic white in my opinion. If anyone is getting oscillation issues, see my comment higher up - it might be just a simple matter of a reversed tranny.

Hmm, quite weird. My first build had exactly that ridiculous amount of gain on tap and I used it maxed out - it sounded amazing. Now I made another one which sounds exactly the same but I get crazy ass low frequency oscillation at certain points of the nature pot taper. I'm 95% sure the tranny is the right way around, I tried a few different NPN germaniums even. If I put it the other way around it certainly helps and I only get oscillation at one point of the taper which is something like 15% from the beginning. Less gain and actually, doesn't sound as good. Not as juicy, open and midrangey. Annoying.

Built this some days ago and i love it! It`s a realy great fantastic high gain distortion pedal and i have no oscillation anyway. To get closest to the 14K7 resitors i used 15K and 1M in parallel (looks funny too). But to make it perfect for me i`m thinking to get some more bass through the circuit. Any sugestions what cap to increase? Thanks for the great stuff!

Jut build the pink purple fuzz but unfortunately it isn't working. The only sound that is coming through is hiss. The hiss can be altered with the nature and the volume control. When the nature pot is adjusted you can hear more bass in the hiss. That way I think the nature and the volume pot are working like they should.

Measured the transistor values and they seem to be almost the same as JaviCAP.

Q1 (2N5952)D: 6.28S: 1.80G: 0.00

Q2 (BC550C)C: 5.48B: 3.19E: 2.61

Q3 (AC127)C: 2.30B: 0.94E: 0.86

Did check the orientation of all components, found that the 10K resistor was not placed correctly, the rest seems to be OK.

I built this pedal and I really like it. The 2n1308 is very hard to find. I used the 1n4001 diodes instead of the 1n4007's as they were recommended. I used the 20W for the nature which was a pain to order. Over all I really like this pedal and it is a very straight forward build. Here is a picture of my working build if it might help anyone. Thank you for the layout you guys rock!!!

OMG! I loaded up the 'Tonestack w/LPB1' onto this and created a monster. The 'Nature' can be set anywhere and then turn the 'Tone' knob added with the Tonestack w/LPB1 board and.......well you just gotta try it. It's treble Nirvana.

1. Used 2 pots for the nature so now I have independent bass and treble. I did the same on my HoneyBee build.

2. After some testing I settled with using red LEDs instead of the 1n400x's for the clipping. I find I'm able to dial in the gain I like easier and there seems to be more dynamic range and clarity. Maybe I actually just wanted a distortion after all...

In regard to the clipping, so far I think I've preferred higher clipping threshold setups (either 1 LED per direction or 2 si per direction) rather than just 1 si per direction. But there's something I can't quite get my head around, and haven't been able to test properly. If anyone has any experience/insight, please chime in. If, in a given circuit, you use 1 si per direction, set the gain knob relatively low and the volume high, then use LED's, set the gain knob higher, and the volume lower, so that both situations have the same level of clipping and total volume... would there really be a difference in clipping character and picking dynamics?

All that to say, in this circuit you cannot perform that test exactly. I noticed when no diodes are present, as you turn the gain knob up, you get some clipping from the transistors (though the LEDs clip it further). So, using LEDs rather than si will allow for you to turn the gain knob up higher for your targeted clipping level, thus you have 2 stages of clipping (transistor and LED). In theory this would make for a more interesting sound.

Speculation aside, to my ears the si diodes sounded more compressed and fuzzy, while with the LEDs I could dial in more dynamics in clarity.

The Marshall 3005 Lead 12 was a mini-stack with a 12 watt solid state head made in England between 1988 and 1991. People claim it's a gr...

Note

Not all these layouts are verified and some are put together from unverified schematics. So if you have good luck, or bad luck for that matter, then please let me know by dropping a comment in the topic. Thanks.

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